I like soccer, but I don’t really follow any leagues, so I’m wondering if the current situation in MLS is normal for the sport.
There is clearly a best team (New England) and a worst one (San Jose), but everyone else is almost exactly the same in terms of record/points.
Throwing out the two outliers, every other team has between 18 and 27 points. If you take out the second best and worst records, you have ten teams with between 20 and 24 points.
The Western Conference looks like this:
Real Salt Lake 6 6 5 23 pts
LA 6 6 4 22
Chivas USA 6 6 4 22
Houston 4 4 8 20
Colorado 6 8 2 20
Why are the teams so tightly bunched? Is this normal for MLS and/or soccer leagues in general?
It seems bizarre to me. Is it pervasive mediocrity or competitive balance?
It’s because there is a ~$2.7M salary cap. Almost any other league is nothing like this. Take a look at all the top tier league in Europe (Italy, England, Spain, Germany, Holland) and you have 3-4 teams at the top that dominate. Arsenal went undefeated a few years back, that could never happen with the current MLS salary structure.
I think that in time, as more and more teams get there own stadiums and therefor control their revenue, we’ll see a larger salary cap or removal of it all together. I think that’s still 10-15 years away at the minimum.
I also take exception with you claiming New England is clearly the best team. It’s far too early to tell who will end up with the most points at the end of the season, and until the Revs play a game against the Fire where they don’t get destroyed I’m going to claim my Fire is the best in the league.
Once you ignore the few dominant teams in a league such as the Premiership, the spread of points is a lot more even, a bit more comparable to that observed in MLS. Leave the humiliating Derby with 11 points off of of last season’s final table, and the spread of points from Birmingham all the way up to fifth-place Everton runs from 35 to 65. In the next league down, there were no runaway leaders, and only one team out of twenty-four finished on less than half the points of the winners West Brom.
It is a sign of a competitive league. Any team can have the start of a change of fortune with a couple of good wins, or conversely a couple of loses and it all can look a lot bleaker.